2020 has been a year unlike any other. Because of the global pandemic, customer needs and demands have shifted in ways that few, if any, companies were prepared to handle.

All of this means companies are having to re-examine how they approach consumers to align with these new realities. How well organisations can adapt to this new era of adaptability, will define market winners and losers for years to come.

Where are the customers?

The pandemic has accelerated the need to implement digital transformation programs to create initiatives to better serve the connected consumer. That’s certainly logical and necessary in our app-driven world during a point in time when more and more purchases are made online versus in-store.

But as they’ve gone about it, too many businesses are forgetting a crucial element: the need to engage with customers on a human level.

To be sure, most businesses remain as committed as ever to customer experience as their true north—more so, actually, given that consumers hold unprecedented power in an age when they can learn everything about a company and its products online and switch brand allegiances with a click or a phone tap.

Many restaurants have gone on lockdown during the pandemic but think about how easy it is to order a complete family dinner, have it delivered to your door, and leave a review on HungryGoWhere.

Or think about how easy it is to shop for groceries by having the store select, bag and bring your items to your call for contact-less pick up. The companies have been able to shift to these types of services “get it” because they’re able to put themselves in the customer’s shoes in all their interactions.

Also Read: How to leverage data to build a compelling story

However, as customer interactions have moved out of the physical world and into the digital, some businesses have increasingly come to see their customers through the lens of data instead of as people to be known, understood and empathised with.

Are the digital experiences you’re creating pushing people away?

The big data fascination that has taken off concurrently with the app craze has led businesses to depend on data-driven insights—clicks, email response rates, behavioural actions, etc.—for clues into what customers like or dislike.

While such analytics can be useful in helping companies discern trends in customer behaviour, all of that data isn’t a replacement for real human experience.

Customer experience, after all, is made up of a variety of touch points and interactions that a consumer has with a brand—its products, services, employees, even its cultural values—across multiple channels over the course of the relationship. Almost all of it is driven by emotion and how the customer feels about the experience.

In fact, in a recent Salesforce study, 84 per cent of consumers surveyed said customer experience is now just as important as a company’s products or services. Tellingly, 75 per cent reported that they expect companies to use new technologies to foster extraordinary experiences, yet 54 per cent said it’s harder than ever for businesses to earn their trust.

The main takeaway from those findings is that the digital initiatives companies are relying on to bring themselves closer to customers are too often having the opposite effect and creating more distance between them.

Ironically, while consumers have never been more empowered, they also have never been more helpless, their voice more lost. Too many companies view them as digital exhaust, a trail of 1s and 0s from online interactions to be analysed, with the information used in outreach that, all too often, doesn’t feel authentic or personal. 

There’s no substitute for genuine human insight

The words of Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, still ring true today. “Watching these companies spend millions of dollars, in marketing and advertisement, in order to make me come back to them,” the Walmart founder once said. “When actually I was there already, and all they had to do was a simple, cheap and easy thing: treat me with a little courtesy.”

Companies must realise there are things you simply can’t do with an app and with data analytics. There’s no substitute for genuine human insight to keep a business’s fingers on the pulse of customers’ ever-changing expectations, needs and desires. During the current pandemic, this has never been more important. 

Also Read: Why reciprocity is key to building deep customer relationships

That’s why companies need to make a priority of relying less on data and the generic marketing persona they yield and more on deep, empathetic understanding of what customers do, think and feel.

To be clear, companies are trying to do the right thing when they focus on building good digital experiences. They just get it wrong when they fall in love with data and fail to proactively listen to customers as living, breathing human beings.

If you want to win in the current and post-pandemic world, understand that digital innovation hasn’t changed the need for a business to relate to people as people.

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